Arcadia Public Library

Vance, a former marine and Yale Law School graduate, provides an account of growing up in a poor Rust Belt town that offers a broader, probing look at the struggles of America's white working class. The decline of this group, a demographic of our country that has been slowly disintegrating over forty years, has been reported on with growing frequency and alarm. J.D. Vance tells the true story of what a social, regional, and class decline feels like...

In Toronto, Izabel, Bebeth, Natasha, Benoît, Grace and Jean, members of Ontario’s “working poor” directly affected by the economic crisis, agree to take part in group sessions organized by filmmaker Geoff Bowie. They talk about having to work multiple jobs to get by, describe the stress generated by financial vulnerability, and courageously explain their strategies for getting out of their difficult situation. Touching, insightful and full...

Tai A Chau is home for both farmers and fishermen who use the island as a permanent harborfor their small floating homes. The daily routines of Mr. Wong, a fisherman, and Mr. Ng, a farmer, are representative of their respective problems of survival, mutual dependence, and hopes for the future.

"A profound and provocative examination of America in crisis, where unemployment, deindustrialization, and a bitter hopelessness and malaise have resulted in an epidemic of diseases of despair--drug abuse, gambling, suicide, magical thinking, xenophobia, and a culture of sadism and hate. America, says Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Chris Hedges, is convulsed by an array of pathologies that have arisen out of profound hopelessness, a bitter despair...

In the summer of 1945, Dresden factory workers send their colleague, Kalle, hundreds of miles north to pick up carbide, which is needed for welding jobs in their factory. His attempts to bring the supplies back through the Soviet occupation zone become a hilarious odyssey full of high jinks and misadventures. A rare classic of German film comedy! Right after WWII, factory worker Karl Bluecher, nicknamed Kalle, sets out from Dresden for Wittenberge...

The first feature film by the director of Battleship Potemkin, Sergei Eisenstein's Strike is a visual tour-de-force that employs dynamic editing and experimental camerawork to dramatize the saga of a bitterly-fought factory strike in 1903.

A forgotten classic, Crime of love is a story about two factory workers living in Northern Italy who form a romantic connection. The woman, torn between the freedoms of the North and her traditional Sicilian values, slowly allows herself to love, then marry, her co-worker. Soon after her wedding, she dies as a result of industrial pollution from her job. The film gives a good idea of the north-south mentality clash in Italy. The workers from the...

When Guendelsberger took a pre-Christmas job at an Amazon fulfillment center outside Louisville, Kentucky, the vending machines were stocked with painkillers, and the staff turnover was dizzying. In the new year she traveled to North Carolina to work at a call center, a place where even bathroom breaks were timed to the second. Then she was hired at a San Francisco McDonald's, narrowly escaping revenge-seeking customers who pelted her with condiments....